Conrad Black was convicted of fraud. The situation with Google is entirely different.

They have a contract with their employees for matching charitable contributions. This is a significant employee benefit.

It's asinine to insist that all of Google's employees be Social Democrats, Green Party, or any other single political block. They are a diverse group, and they will support a diverse set of causes, as diverse groups of people do.

Sergey, Larry, and Eric have been reasonable custodians of their company in an environment where, had it been possible for them to do so, an activist investor like a Carl Icahn, T. Boone Pickens, Jr., or like Starboard Value LP had taken over the entire Darden board, and basically killed Olive Garden (U.S. same-store sales slid 1.3% last quarter).

Activist investors are more generally Gordon Gecko's than they are people who want to help grow the business. It's pretty clear that Starboard fully intends to spin off the Darden group Real Estate holding as a separate liquidation, which will increase the per-store flooring costs. This was in fact a key point of their presentations to shareholders: take short term profit for long term loss (but by then you've sold out to some sucker who is only looking at quarter over quarter profits, one quarter deep).

God help Google if someone like Icahn or Einhorn gets his hooks as deeply into Google as both of them have gotten their hooks into Apple.

Outside the scope of Slashdot--that is, the real world--what are you possibly talking about, please? Held your argument the slightest shred of validity, Ron would not have penned "End the Fed". Are you saying that there is some secret, hidden, inner plot unbeknownst to much of anyone?
Imma guessin' you've saddled your troll pony for a little ride.

It pretty much doesn't damn well matter. The investors can want whatever they want, and it won't matter.

Between Sergey, Larry, and Eric, they control more than 50% of the voting stock, and therefore they control the board, and the investors can go pound sand for all of the real fiscal influence they have on the company. The can more or less just shut up and take their profits on the rise of the non-voting stock price, or they can sell their stock and let someone else take the profits.

PS: I notice no one has mentioned the fact that a lot of the charitable organizations they are giving to are 501(c)(3)'s, and they represent matching contributions for contributions by employees:

"Google will match employee donations from a minimum gift of $50 up to $6,000 per donor per year."

https://doublethedonation.com/...

Particle clusters seem to occur at exponents of baseline energies for what we consider to be ordinary particles. The exotic particles we've found have been at the higher end.

If you look at the early work by Dr. Jay Phippen, you'll see the intentional constraints he places on the pair production is the solution set to 12 (actually, 11, one was an identity) Feynman-Dyson diagrams. I believe his thesis is on file at Utah State University. The initial computations were done at Los Alamos labs, back with the CDC Cyber was "hot stuff". During the mid 1980's, when he was my mentor, I ported his software and the matrix math for him to Sun Microsystems equipment, and he was able to reproduce the results, which got us really, really close to the predicted mass of the W particle.

It also let us tweak things substantially, trying a lot more Monte Carlo collision simulations in a shorter period of time, and given that the new hardware was capable of representing much larger numbers, it allowed the extension of the test energy rangers much higher (into the Higgs arena, and beyond).

FWIW, the collisions were simulations of relativistically invariant P-P and P-N collisions using the Berkeley Physics package, and the produced particle pairs were further constrained by the physics after they were produced (i.e. energy, angle, and so on as to what counted as an "allowable" pair).

I believe you can also find some references to it through my other faculty advisor, Dr. Robert Capener's work, although he abandoned his involvement in the U.S. atomic weapons program shortly after the neutron bomb was created, and concentrated mostly on CS after that.

So I think it's improbable that we have seen our last new particles.

Nope. It's because it was a USA Today hit piece from 6 months ago, and educators, parents, and guidance counselors don't want to take responsibility for the input to the pipeline, and it's a slow news day.

They don't release the numbers because they don't want to be blamed for them, when they can only take whatever output comes out of the pipeline.

It's not like there are huge numbers of PhD CS people in the underrepresented minorities just sitting around twiddling their thumbs: everyone knows that the only people who get discriminated against for these jobs are people who are old (sorry... "not 'digital natives'... must use the code words), or who learned by doing, and so have no reasonable credentials with which to protect their employers in the event of a lawsuit.

It's also not like the CollegeBoard would not *gleefully* take the money of anyone who wanted to pay for the AP Computer Science test, or any other freaking AP test, period: they will happily take *all* your money if you are willing to give it to them.

No the problem is the input to the pipeline, and it's not being addressed, and so on slow news days, you get attack pieces on the people on the other end, as if they could magically make an Comparative Literate graduate into a software engineer.

Patient 0 for the Disneyland outbreak had just returned from the Philippines, which is a measles hot zone, and did not self-quarantine for a couple of weeks before mixing with the public, and so did not know he was sick.

Here are the WHO statistics on the number of cases of various diseases reported for various countries, through 2014:

http://apps.who.int/immunizati...

The Philippines has the highest incidence of measles of any country (but China, with a vastly larger population, is not that far behind).

It's endemic in some populations; also: a bacteria, Corynebacterium diphtheriae, not a virus, FWIW.

Yes. There are large reservoirs of the bacteria in many North African countries, as well as Pakistan. What's only noted in a couple of places is that while the kid was "a resident of Olot (Girona)", the kids origin was as an adoption of an immigrant child.

To see the reservoirs, here is the World Health Organization data on reported cases by country through 2014:

http://apps.who.int/immunizati...

If you care, you can also look at diseases other than Diphtheria, across the top of the chart. For example, there were 52'628 cases of measles in China in 2014, and there are rather large reservoirs in the Philippines as well (which is whre the person who was pation zero in the Disneyland measles outbreak had just travelled into the U.S. from, presumably infectious at the time they travelled. Somalia, India, Ethiopia, Viet Nam, and China also have significant measles reservoirs.

http://apps.who.int/immunizati...

Of course, we don't perform health examinations or quarantines on people traveling from these hot zones into the U.S.

P.S. India, the U.S., and Australia are the top reservoirs for pertussis (whooping cough), so it'd be a good idea to check those people too, if they happen to be coming into your country.

We have found particles at energies of x^1, x^2, and now with the W and Higgs, x^3. There's good reason within the standard model to believe that this progression will continue at least through x^4. It's fairly easy to see the energy ranges where the particles so far have clustered, and there really no rational reason that there won't be a cluster at even higher energies, based on the same Feynman-Dyson diagram solutions that resulted in use predicting the W and Higgs energy ranges. If you Monte Carlo at the higher energy ranges with the same constraints on the relativistically invariant pair production, the math shows particle spikes up to 10^5 (not that the LHC can hit those energies, but the math works...).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...

It's not clear under what grounds you consider either Paul "fascist". Was it their use of that famous fascist symbol set, the Roman Alphabet?

Supergreen.

While you were busy 'reading articles', he was busy getting a low ID. BTW, UID 1 never read an article.

I love all you Americans crowing about the uselessness of the coming distributed energy age. Y'all might be correct as far as the US goes (and for now), but for billions of us in the rest of the world, shit like this has either been cost-effective for years or one of the few methods to get any kind of electricity when you don't the massive capital for the old-school way.

Actually... that's kind of the perfect reason to not listen to what they are saying.

Yes... but they're FRENCH. F R E N C H.

I'm all for nuclear power, but OMG! F R E N C H!